Ungendering Civilization by Pyburn K. Anne;

Author:Pyburn, K. Anne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Tracing women in early Sumer1

Layla Al-Zubaidi

Essentializing ancient Mesopotamia: identifications and the past

Ancient Mesopotamia is not only the object of scientific endeavor, but also an arena for the identity contests of scholars. Caught in the ambivalence of a “mixed feeling of both kinship and alienness” (Larsen 1992), Western archaeologists have traditionally conceived ancient Mesopotamia as the origin of European culture on the one hand, but on the other hand a historic constituent of today’s “Muslim world,” often seen as the antithesis of the world the archaeologist inhabits. Somehow, Mesopotamia gave rise to “us” as well as “the other.”

Studies of gender relations are similarly ambivalent. For example, in discussing Sumerian priestesses and queens, authors never stress continuity with the present, but discussions of female subordination are invariably used as evidence of cultural continuity with the present. The prevailing gender paradigm emphasizes the public–private opposition, which archaeologists see as derived from the distant past:

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